It has been a choppy few years for Britain, and one thing there has never been a shortage of, during repeated squalls, is the suggestion that we are all in "this", whatever "this" may be, together. And I'm not referring only to the Conservative party. When finance crashed, a number of irritating pundits argued that it was the fault of everybody, for maxing out their credit cards, taking on giant mortgages, and living beyond their means.

When politics crashed, during the expenses scandal, similar arguments were made, with even less success. That was the fault of everybody, too, for refusing to accept that MPs should have much higher salaries, therefore pretty much forcing them to eke out their miserable existences by relying on expenses-as-lifestyle-subsidy.

This latest crash, basically of the mainstream media, has so far seen fewer people insisting that the public is to blame. That's strange, because in this case the fault-of-the-people argument is actually much more pertinent.

First and foremost, the fault-of-the-people argument is pertinent because, rightly or wrongly, it has been successfully used for many years, by media organisations serving up private information as if it was public information. Set aside, for the moment, the general revulsion that has greeted revelations about how some of this information was initially obtained. Because the truth is that even if it had all been delivered by the stork, it should never have been published anyway.

Fraser Brown's cystic fibrosis is a case in point. Even now, the child's parents are no doubt obliged to shield him from discombobulating intrusion into his five-year-old life. This latest intrusion, of course, is a direct consequence of the first one, in November 2006, when the Sun, under the editorship of Rebekah Brooks, came to the amazing conclusion that it was up to her, not his parents, to decide if, when, how and why details about their son's health should be revealed to the public.

The Sun's parent company, News International, is now insisting that the information was obtained not by employing "dark arts" but through the agency of a concerned member of the public. This member of the public is not so certain of his rectitude that he will put a face and a name to his excuses. But he claims that he went to the Sun because he felt, as a parent of a child with cystic fibrosis himself, that Brown should seize his golden opportunity to publicise the illness, thereby providing education to a public that could not learn anything at all unless a famous person was attached to the "issue". In other words, the usual excuse.

Clearly, Brooks believed that she "deserved" her exclusive, which she did not. The fact that Brown still cravenly turned up at this creature's wedding, after she had done such a thing to him, illustrates how the dizzying sense of entitlement adopted by many in the media, perhaps especially at News International, was bolstered by the failure of politicians to challenge it.

The point is that the Sun took the information and used it as if it belonged to the paper. News International may have been able for years to hide the illegal means by which it obtained many of its stories. But it did not conceal the stories – far from it. The rotten fruits of much of the moral corruption that is now being fulminated about was hidden in plain sight all along.

It was the media's refusal to respect privacy – usually cloaking their intrusion in one "moral" textile or another – that led to the seeking of superinjunctions. An adult's sexual behaviour, however reprehensible it may be, rarely needs to be exposed "in the public interest". The revelation of the hacking of the phones of ordinary people engulfed by crime was the wake-up call that brought home to the public the extremity of the twisted logic and desperate entitlement that guided the actions of some journalists.

But those techinques were merely the anti-acme of a prevailing attitude, which dictated that no one in the public eye, for whatever reason, had any entitlement to privacy at all. Again, the attitude, if not the depths to which it could escort people, was in plain sight all along.

The former News of the World journalist Paul McMullan (who was "beer-trapped" by the actor Hugh Grant into breaking this story open) summed it up. McMullan declared on last Friday's Newsnight that he considered it ridiculous that someone being paid millions of pounds to star in a film should bleat about journalists listening to his messages. Put so baldly, the claim is risible. But for many years there has been widespread acquiescence to the idea that it's reasonable, even necessary, to punish imperfect humans for their success or wealth – particularly when that success is wholly or even partly put down to the agency of the media in the first place (and that covers everyone). But the attitude itself is wrong, and the fact that the press, particularly the Daily Mail, is still full of such stories at this particular time suggests that much of the media, and some of the public, don't get this at all.

The funny thing is this: while Murdoch's empire may now be crumbling, one of the magnate's objectives has been fulsomely achieved, and remains, as yet, unchallenged. He wanted to destroy British deference to people who had, or seemed to have, a sense of entitlement. His own sense of entitlement, fostered among all of the lieutenants in his own organisation and beyond, trumped everyone else's.

The compact was between him and the public whose interest, however prurient, his newspapers piqued, directly or indirectly. It was Murdoch, his clients and all those others who picked up the stories, ran them and read them versus the rest of the culture. Much of that culture has accepted to some degree that public figures – even the weeping parents of stolen children, especially the not-weeping parents of stolen children – are always, in some sense, fair game. I repeat. Even now, the debate is all about illegal means, not bogus, self-righteous, spiteful, resentful, petty, judgmental and repellently self-interested attitudes.

Britain can only save itself from Murdoch by re-examining that baleful legacy, and understanding that by threatening the exposure and condemnation of private, human failings, the Murdoch empire, and much of the rest of the press, held the politicians, the police, and the entire population, to ransom. The City? Yes, that too. Murdoch himself promoted the idea that money-makers such as himself could do no wrong, and that a society's infrastructure should be constructed around their wants. It's not enough to allow News Corp to collapse under the weight of its own bad attitudes. Those bad attitudes have been embraced by much of this country, and they now have to be carefully, honestly and exhaustively reassessed. We really can do much, much better in the future.